Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Showing It All, Revealing Nothing

Sebastian Stan’s torso catches the eye of from left, Ellen Burstyn, Mare Winningham and Elizabeth Marvel in "Picnic."Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Now that the awards-giving season in theater is nearly over, and we’ve exhausted such ponderous topics as the relative worth of various actors and dramas, can we get superficial for a moment? O.K., even more superficial. You see, I’ve been thinking about what the well-dressed stage has been wearing recently, which seems to be undressed men.

Full nudity has been a customary part of the mainstream Western theater since the 1960s and ’70s, while avant-gardists were regularly disrobing for public consumption a good decade earlier. But I have never been confronted with as many male chests, buttocks and genitalia as I have in visits to Broadway and West End theaters during the last six months.

They have shown up in settings as far-flung as Victorian hotel rooms and the Malay Peninsula (in the London revivals of David Hare’s “Judas Kiss” and Peter Nichols’s “Privates on Parade”); shabby Manhattan apartments (the New York productions of Douglas Carter Beane’s “Nance” and Richard Greenberg’s adaptation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”); and a dusty, godforsaken town in the Midwest (William Inge’s “Picnic” on Broadway, where nudity stopped at the waist, but was nonetheless thoroughly exploited).

A few sets of women’s breasts have occasionally made the cut. But mostly, the unclad actors who have taken over New York and London stages have been men. Make that young men, all in the possession of gleaming, sculptured, hairless torsos that come from long acquaintance with personal trainers and electrolysists and are, to be honest, mostly interchangeable.

As naked people go, they tend to be less erotic than aesthetic, and they are usually about as sexy as Grecian urns. As for their being revealing in any less than an obvious sense, forget about it. When one of these actors takes off his clothes, he’s putting on the set of armor that is this era’s regulation gym-toned body.

From the point of view of an actor — who, being an actor, is guaranteed to have his fair share of vanity — the desire to be buff when under scrutiny is understandable. Just think of the discomfort that you undergo every summer when you contemplate putting on a bathing suit, then multiply that at least a dozenfold.

And don’t forget that we’re in an age in which photos of famous people are immediately posted on the Internet for the laser-eyed analysis of the multitudes. The same fear that puts movie stars into anonymously tasteful evening outfits for the red carpet is probably partly responsible for the standardization of the stage-worthy body.

But the ubiquity of the perfect chassis has required a certain, and I think considerable, sacrifice. We’ve exchanged nakedness, which is all about being genuinely exposed, for mere nudity, which is about being decorative.

These days, as likely as not, when an actor strips down, he’s also shedding much of the individual character he has otherwise worked so painstakingly to create. He becomes (gasp!) an object, rather like the scantily robed Ziegfeld girls of yore: eye candy for the tired businesswoman or gay man. (And don’t think that producers aren’t banking on the appeal to that reliable theatergoing demographic.)

I suppose there’s an upside to this trend. After decades of putting the flesh of women on display, there’s justice in men finally getting the same treatment. Besides, isn’t it healthy not to be ashamed of the human body? Isn’t our not being shocked by its full disclosure an instance of progress?

Great acting, though, should be shocking. When audiences are in the presence of a first-rate performer, it’s as if they have been endowed for a couple of hours with X-ray vision. We imagine we can see the skull, and the soul, beneath the skin. An actor is always unclothed, and that state of being shouldn’t stop when the clothes literally come off.

This notion should be a given. But I became newly aware of it when I saw the 2002 Broadway revival of Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” The original version of this two-character comedy, in 1987 at the Manhattan Theater Club, had starred Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh, whose bodies had visibly succumbed to the pull of gravity.

The production began with the title characters, who had just had their first date, in mid-coitus. And as they emerged from beneath the sheets, there was something deeply touching about the undisguised ordinariness of them. This vision set the gracefully awkward course for a show in which two self-defined schlemiels learned to trust each other and perhaps, just perhaps, fall in love.

The revival starred Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci, who spent the opening moments uncompromisingly starkers. Now it is true that as a couple they did not bring to mind Brad and Angelina (And, yes, I hadn’t forgotten there was a misguided 1991 film version starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino.) But Mr. Tucci, in particular, looked like the sort of guy who never left the house without checking his body fat index.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Johnny may have had Mr. Tucci’s likably unremarkable face, but his body was that of an Adonis. And for me, at least, it detracted from the poignancy of an otherwise very good revival.

At that point, I still had in my mind a similar opening scene from seven years earlier, the one that began Scott Elliott’s benchmark production of Mike Leigh’s “Ecstasy” for the New Group. That stark post-coital moment, in which a dejected woman sat on the edge of a bed inhabited by a paunchy man, inspired me to write about the distinction between nudity, which is “decorative, silly or titillating,” and nakedness, which “exposes skin to expose much more.”

Sometimes actors give such thoroughly naked, natural interpretations of a part that you forget whether they actually ever took their clothes off; their performances are that seamless. In other cases, nakedness is used as an effective and justifiable coup de théâtre.

In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2007 production of “King Lear,” raging madness drove the title character, played by Ian McKellen, to divest himself of every piece of clothing in the storm scene, save one. That was a shirt that got caught on his head as he was trying to take it off.

What we saw, for just a few seconds, was a pale, headless body running to seed, like something you might find on a mortuary table. And I flashed onto a nearly forgotten image from years earlier of a homeless person, wearing only a pair of derelict boots, whom I had come across just before dawn on St. Marks Place. Two words from “Lear,” “unaccommodated man,” had floated into my mind then. And here was Mr. McKellen, perfectly evoking them as Lear himself, translating into flesh what the scholar Harold Bloom has called “the terrible intimacy” of that tragedy.

The final scene of Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” staged in New York in 1998 (starring Kathleen Chalfant) and revived on Broadway last year (with Cynthia Nixon), ended with what might be called a profound flash of nakedness, as powerful in its way as the one provided by Mr. McKellen’s Lear. In it, Vivian, a college professor dying of cancer, steps elegantly out of the hospital gown she has been wearing throughout the show.

The body is almost skeletal. But there’s nothing morbid in the sight. It’s as if in throwing off her clothes, Vivian is also shuffling off the mortal coil. She’s ascending into something like the ether of the metaphysical poetry she teaches.

This past season, though, I can’t say I saw any nakedness on mainstream stages, just nudity, which was usually more of an annoying distraction than an amusing diversion. Was there any reason beyond prurience to have Emilia Clarke and Cory Michael Smith (as Holly Golightly and the show’s narrator) emerge dripping wet and beautiful from a bathtub toward the end of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”?

The merman-like emergence from yet another tub by Jonny Orsini, playing the love interest to Nathan Lane’s closeted burlesque actor in “The Nance,” seems to exist principally as the setup for a punch line about his natural endowments. Sebastian Stan kept his trousers on in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Picnic,” but his torso was on such abundant display that it seemed to warrant above-the-title billing.

And would either of these vagabond characters, especially Mr. Stan’s hard-living drifter, have such anachronistically, impeccably maintained bodies? Of the hyperbuff specimens paraded throughout the season, only that of Cheyenne Jackson, who wore his physique with wit as a porn star in the short-lived “Performers,” seemed entirely appropriate to the time, place and profession of his character.

In London, the second act of Richard Eyre’s revival of “Judas Kiss,” a portrait of the last years of Oscar Wilde, featured two young actors lolling, posing and frolicking in the altogether. One was playing Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the other the Italian lad Douglas had picked up in the street; in such a state, they brought to mind less late 19th-century Naples than a pair of animated Playgirl centerfolds.

In stolid, bundled-up contrast was the man who sat virtually immobile throughout the scene. That was Rupert Everett as Wilde, wearing in addition to the dandyish attire his character favored, the insulation of corpulence-simulating padding. And in the eyes of Mr. Everett’s Wilde, as he gazed forlornly on the improbably beautiful bodies around him, I saw the shock of naked, thwarted, despairing desire. The most covered-up man on stage was the only one who was truly in the raw.

A version of this article appears in print on June 9, 2013, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Showing It All, Revealing Nothing. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe